Abstract

There are two general types of scholarly approaches to past sexual violence directed at females. First, there are the trans-historical approaches of feminist theorists who see male sexuality as a constant and rape as a majortrans-cultural social force, part of a male strategy of power and domination. Second, many historians of gender want to, as Garthine Walker writes, ‘locaterape as historically specific rather than as a trans historical phenomenon…no longer characterised by silence but by a desire to listen to and to analyse the testimonies of raped and sexually assaulted women, alleged rapists and witnesses’. There is an attempt to read the narratives of sexual assault in terms of the cultural conventions of the time and to study the narrative structure, the use of language and metaphor, and the silences and evasions.